Neo-Imperialism

Since 1947, the construction of 4,300 large dams has displaced more than 4.4 million people across India. All these people belong to poor rural areas. In the majority of these cases, rehabilitation process of these displaced people was a failure. We do not experience power cuts in metro cities like Delhi, Mumbai or Bengaluru. While these are common to many villages of  Bihar, Jharkhand, and Orissa. 

Imperialism in layman's terms means depriving a section of the population the resources and giving it to remaining few for their imperial needs. Until the mid of the twentieth century, a major part of Asia and Africa was ruled by  European powers for their imperial needs. After the end of world war, India became politically independent but economic and social conditions of rural India are still in trouble.

Current Model of Development

Out of the 1.3 billion population of India, more than one billion live in rural areas. Merely 300 million people live in urban areas and metro cities. But when you look around yourself on the things which you are consuming (you are looking on your laptop, mobile, clothes etc.), a major chunk of these are produced in urban areas. India has set a growth rate of 7% per annum as a new normal. All the economy and its growth are concentrated in the hands of 300 million people out of 1.3 billion. This creates problems of unemployment, un-education, malnutrition in rural India. Further, the unemployment in rural areas creates problems of urbanization and slums in the metro cities. Population pressure on metro cities degrades the quality of natural resources such as water, air, land in the metro cities and also creates a problem of garbage. 

Problems in Policymaking

All the above problems have been caused because we have borrowed our current model of development from western countries and applied it directly to India. We didn't care about the basic assumptions of before applying this model to India. We assumed that all the conditions in the west and India are the same. this is the point where we did a blunder. One of the assumptions which I am trying to point out is that we assumed our population distribution same as that of the west. In Norway, the definition of rural area is a place where the distance between two consecutive houses is more than 200 meters. With such a population distribution west can easily implant its industry in urban areas. But, this is not the case in India.

Way Ahead
Gandhiji in the 1930s talked about village republics. Which meant, villages would be self-sufficient for the majority of its needs. There would be small mills in the vicinity of villages for producing the essentials like clothes, furniture etc. But, now all the things are being produced in urban areas and resources of rural areas are draining towards urban areas, we need to make this relation again a symbiotic one from the current dependent one. We need to re-engineer our technology. India is a labor abundant and capital short country. Due to infrastructure bottlenecks in India economies of scale isn't valid above certain levels. So, we need to build small-scale labor-intensive manufacturing plants. It is not going back but it is adjusting our system according to our requirements. for example, for a chemical industry to set up, we require a large amount of capital, land. Both are scarce in India. instead of installing a large plant we should re-engineer technology to create numbers of small-scale chemical plants at small levels. This will save our capital and generate more employment. It will also add up to rural economy as these small-scale plants will be installed in rural areas.

So, the need of the hour is to rethink upon our policies and make a new model of development for Indian needs. Such a model will make the relation of urban and rural India more healthy. The current model isn't sustainable in India. Its imperialistic nature is drainig resources from 1 billion and is giving to just 300 million. The new model will not only take care of only 300 million people but it will cater to the needs of all 1.3 billion.